Assistive Robotics Needs for Older Care: Using Authentic Citations to Bridge the Gap between Understanding Older Persons’ Needs and Defining Solutions

AbstractDeveloping an authentic understanding of potential users’ needs and translating these into usable categories as an input to research and development is an open problem. It is generally accepted that genuine knowledge of user needs is essential for the creation of any new technology. For assistive robots, however, this knowledge is even more important for two key reasons. First, because the form and function of these technologies is still in the process of negotiation, and second, because assistive robots are ultimately intended for a vulnerable population. In this paper, we describe a number of existing strategies to address this challenge and discuss some of their shortcomings, including a loss of data richness and context, the stereotyping of users and a lack of transparency and traceability. The primary contribution of this paper is a novel Authentic Citations process for capturing needs which aims to address these shortcomings. This process involves a thematic analysis of complex qualitative data to derive robotics needs for older people, which emphasises the retention of the original situated description, or ‘authentic citation’, for ongoing sensitising and grounding a